In the basement of a five-star hotel in London, just before Christmas, Rebecca Hall — one of the stars of the latest Woody Allen film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona — is holding court before an audience of the British film industry’s biggest cheeses. The people in the room are captivated by the 26-year-old, who is seen as one of the brightest lights coming through in cinema, until an excited whisper comes from the back of the room: “Penelope’s coming, Penelope’s coming.” From that moment, Hall might as well only be on stage to fill the water jugs. She is ignored as flashbulbs go off and necks strain towards the door. Penelope Cruz has entered the building.
There is something about Cruz that makes people forget their manners. When I ask ordinarily sensible friends what I should ask the 34-year-old Spaniard when I meet her, a month later, to talk about her Oscar nomination for her supporting role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, they all fail to offer a question, and instead swoon over her extraordinary beauty.
And she is stunning; in the flesh she almost looks like a character from a Japanese manga cartoon, with her disproportionately big brown eyes peering out from her tiny little face. Even wearing ripped jeans, a sober black shirt and jacket, and wearing thick makeup that fails to disguise a few reassuring spots, there is something terribly sexy about her — particularly the thicket of dark, messy hair that looks as though it has been roughed up on a pillow all afternoon. Then you have the accent. It’s still audible — she struggles sometimes with the “d” in “Woody,” so that it sounds like “woolly” — but it has certainly mellowed since the days when she first went to Hollywood and had to learn her lines for The Hi-Lo Country phonetically, never really understanding a word she was saying.
Cruz’s sensuality was what got her noticed, aged 17, in the very raunchy Spanish film Jamon, Jamon, in which she rolled around alongside Javier Bardem (now her real-life boyfriend), and it plays a crucial role in her latest film, too. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Cruz plays the manic and murderous ex-wife of Juan Antonio Gonzalo, played by Bardem; she returns to the marital home to taunt his new lovers, American tourists played by Hall and Scarlett Johansson.
For the film to work, you have to believe that a man really would risk messing things up with the pouting, gorgeous Johansson by sleeping with his unhinged ex, an artist who had tried to kill him on numerous occasions. But when you see Cruz as Maria Elena, wearing the skimpiest of playsuits (of all things), and painting like a woman possessed, suddenly Allen’s implausible plot doesn’t seem so ludicrous after all.
Cruz doesn’t enter the film until halfway through and can’t have more than about 15 minutes of screen time. But her tremendous performance — plus the much-talked-about kiss with Johansson (currently being perved over by thousands of horny teenagers on YouTube) — steals the show. Without her, the film would just be another one of the sad ageing-male fantasies in which Allen increasingly specializes.
Not that Cruz will hear a word said against the 73-year-old director. Doesn’t it make her feel uncomfortable, I ask, how he latches on to stunning young actresses such as herself and Johansson, and makes lascivious remarks about them as he drapes himself around them for photos? Absolutely not, she insists. “He is so ... he is so charming and so funny and so respectful and so smart, too smart for that,” she says, adding that he only makes pervy comments to make people laugh. “On set he would say something completely wild and I would say, ‘I can’t believe those words came out of your mouth!’” Allen, she says, is “very peculiar — but I love him.”
Also See: Cruz control
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located